Bluesky

This is how things are supposed to work: We pay our taxes. The IRS collects them, and they are deposited into the US General Fund. These dollars from the General Fund are then disbursed to agencies according to what is authorized and appropriated to them under law by Congress. Agencies then dole this money out to state and local governments, or to community organizations and other partners, through grants or contracts. Some agency allocations decisions are formula-based (e.g., based on population or other criteria), while others depend on expert advice to make these adjudications.

But if Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought gets his way, this long-standing process will be put in the dustbin. Under proposed revisions to the Uniform Guidance that governs the expenditure of federal funds, decisions on all grants will now be in the hands of political commissars rather than subject-matter experts. The new proposed rule is over 400 pages long, and there are many other terrible provisions within it.

The new rule affects everything from healthcare, transportation, education, and food assistance to, of course, scientific research. This means grants to rural hospitals, for mass transit and road and bridge repair, for special education programs and Head Start, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and cancer research would now be subject to the whims of Russell Vought and his cronies.

In my world of scientific research, the proposed rules have set off alarm bells everywhere, even among institutions that have been cautious and reticent about taking on the Trump administration so directly until now, like Research!America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and universities like mine. They all recognize that should this rule be promulgated, it would be the end of science as we know it in America. Thus, everyone is mobilizing to get comments in on the proposed rule before the July 13 deadline ( you should write a comment too—this rule will affect you, your family, and your community), talking to their members of Congress, and prepping for legal challenges, as Vought will not be deterred from his quest by public opinion or what our duly elected federal representatives have to say.

But what is Vought’s quest anyway? I am so, so tired of the attempts to fit dear Russ into paradigms of normal political policymaking. Let’s put it this way: If you thought Elon Musk and DOGE were bad (and they were and are responsible for the deaths of many just by dismantling USAID alone), Vought is 100 times worse. This rule is codifying the work of DOGE and taking it to a whole other level.

And why does he do what he does? The man is a devout Christian and a deacon of his church, but like the administration’s other my-religion-is-what-I-say-it-is dude, JD Vance, his Christianity is nothing you’d recognize from the Sermon on the Mount. It is a gospel of cruelty. Vought once said he wanted to put civil servants in trauma—it is clear that, if this proposed rule is enacted, it is going to traumatize millions of Americans by gutting many federal programs that serve people from coast to coast. 

This is so far beyond distrust in government and shrinking of the administrative state. It is moving us toward a dystopia out of Octavia Butler’s novels, particularly Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Others have remarked upon how Donald Trump resembles Butler’s character of President Andrew Steele Jarret, but the key insight is written by Butler’s main protagonist in the later novel: “To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” The fool here is Trump. The opportunist here is Vought.

The corruption and vengeance inherent in the new rule—political friends will be rewarded with bid-free contracts and foes will be cut off from support—will create chaos in the end. Think of the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial as a symbol of more to come—incompetence rising like green scum to the top—except across all aspects of American life. Do you really want your bridge repaired by these people? Or to put the fate of rural hospitals in their hands?

And the pain and suffering Vought will inflict on Americans—willingly, with determination, and possibly glee in that cold, cold heart—is destined to create more civil unrest out of people’s sheer desperation as programs they’ve relied on wither should this rule go into effect this fall. This is where the other key opportunist in the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, and his vision of a brave new world “that is governed by strength, that governed by force, that is governed by power,” comes into play. We’ve already seen the pregame with ICE on our streets. The man is looking for reasons to escalate his war on the American people.

I don’t think I am overreacting. While this new OMB rule is only one part of Vought’s plan, the import of it, the potential effects from its enactment are easy to see—it’s why it has garnered concern from most quarters of civil society. It is a massive power play to bring all of us to heel on the road to authoritarianism. It is a punishment doled out by our own Tomás de Torquemada, obsessed with a vision of a God only the Devil knows.